4 days, 5 races Egypt International Orienteering Championship in Alexandria has ended. Hong Kong athletes got great results, with 2 times within top 3.

The first race was PreO, in Montazah Palace Gardens on 1th February with 23 controls, where the top 4 got 22 correct. The champion was Alessio Tenani from Italy, beating other competitors with 10 seconds in time controls. The best athlete from Hong Kong was Chi Ko Abdon Cheung, who got the third with 22 correct and 44 seconds. Wing Chung Tam and Michael Chun Chi Tsang got the 5th and the 7th respectively with 21 correct.

Two races was held on 2th February: sprint first and TempO afterwards, in Arab Academy. The length of sprint was 2.9 kilometres and the climb was 10 metres. Nikola Bilić from Serbia got the champion with 15 minutes and 16 seconds, where Alessio Tenani from Italy was 1 second behind. Wing Chung Tam (17 minutes 5 seconds) and Chi Ko Abdon Cheung (18 minutes 13 seconds) got the 6th and 7th place respectively, while Michael Chun Chi Tsang (24 minutes and 23 seconds) got the 16th place.

Chi Ko Abdon Cheung crossing the sprint finish

There were 5 stations, with 5 controls each at the TempO. The champion was got by Alessio Tenani from Italy again, answering all correctly in 184 seconds. Michael Chun Chi Tsang from Hong Kong completed in 153 seconds, but with 3 mistakes, getting the 2nd place with 243 seconds total time. Chi Ko Abdon Cheung and Wing Chung Tam got the 4th and 11th place with 227 and 442 seconds total time respectively.

FootO model event and TrailO PreO were held on 1st February at El Montazah Park. According to preliminary results, Hong Kong competitors made 1 to 2 mistakes among 23 questions, ranking between the 3rd and the 6th.

FootO sprint and TrailO TempO were held on 2nd February at Arab Academy. Hong Kong competitors finished between 17 and 25 minutes and ranked between the 7th and 16th in FootO sprint class M21 preliminary results, the winning time was about 15 minutes.

Long distance and middle distance races will be held on the upcoming two days, then a tourism day to conclude the series.

TrailO will have world ranking events (WRE) from 2018, the first event will be Mediterranean Championship in Orienteering (MCO) cum Egypt International Orienteering Championship (EIOC), which will be held between 1st to 4th February 2018 in Alexandria, Egypt.

The event will be organised by Egypt Orienteering Federation, OK Vihor from Croatia as the technical organiser. There will be 4 WREs, including FootO sprint, FootO middle, TrailO PreO and TrailO TempO, and a FootO long competition which will be a scoring competition for national teams of MCO, but not a WRE.

Until 12/1, there have been 3 competitors from Hong Kong entered the competition, including Chi Ko Abdon Cheung, Wing Chung Tam and Michael Chun Chi Tsang. The entering deadline is 15/1, please enter soon. The bulletin 3 can be read here.

Furthermore, there will be 6 competitions in FinTrailO 2018 held between 30/3 and 2/4 in Turku, Finland, including 1 PreO and TempO combined, 2 PreOs (the first will be WRE), 1 TempO (WRE), 1 TempO night-O and 1 team relay. The deadline of entering the competition is 22/3, there has already been competitor from Hong Kong entered all 6 competitions. Bulletin 1 can be read here.

Apart from the above events, there will be WREs in Slovenia, Lithuania and Czech Republic. The details can be seen in the event calendar of IOF.

To facilitate the development of trail orienteering (TrailO) in Hong Kong, this site was established in December 2017, providing one-stop information about the sport of trail orienteering in Hong Kong.

From 2018 there will be world ranking events in TrailO like the other three disciplines, but with different scoring scheme. Also, Hong Kong will hold the 1st Asian Trail Orienteering Championships (AsTOC) in 2019, and hold the World Trail Orienteering Championships (WTOC) in 2020, which will be a WTOC held outside Europe again after it was held in 2005 in Japan. This site will update with relevant information then.